San Francisco's residential architecture gets reduced to easy stereotypes: Victorian frills at one extreme, storybook stucco at the other. Then you navigate the streets and hills and realize how simplistic such shorthand can be. Here's an alternate view of the domestic terrain - five buildings with the same individualist spirit that you encounter in the city's residents. Nothing you'll see on a postcard, but a quintet of idiosyncratic landmarks that caught my eye when I encountered them, and have remained vivid in the memory ever since.

Piet Mondrian was one of the 20th century's most influential artists, a Dutch painter whose syncopated evocations of the urban landscape before and during World War II influenced cultural discourse, fashion runways - and this otherwise perfunctory house from 1949 on the Great Highway across from Ocean Beach. Alternate title: "Outer Sunset Boogie-Woogie."

"View-Master House,"

940 Esmeralda Ave.

Not all of San Francisco's patterned residential paint jobs draw on abstract modern artists for inspiration. This snug house from 1956 could pass for the world's largest 3-D View-Master, albeit in colors more surrealistic than anything that Kodak ever conceived. It stands across from Bernal Heights Park, testimony to the area's working-class past and tenacious funk.

Pure International Style architecture is rare in this city, and the surprise is compounded when you stumble across it in the northeast Mission amid Victorians and brick warehouses. This taut composition began life in 1946 as an assembly shop designed by Oakland's Reynolds & Chamberlain. At some point it became a house, the picket fence replaced by a stylish wall in 2012.

The molded equivalent of vinyl siding, Perma-Stone - dubbed "the polyester of brick" by John Waters - was an easy way for East Coast working-class city dwellers to freshen their faded homes in the 1930s and '40s. The trend even found its way out West, mostly on single-family homes but also this 1907 stack of flats near Hayes Valley, so un-stylish it comes as a relief.

You figure there must be a story behind a Spanish Moroccan mirage like this, and you're right. This was the lifetime work of Edward Moffitt, who bought four parcels on a then-unpaved slope of Twin Peaks in 1921. He and his wife built a cabin and the road, but his ambitions grew after he purchased the remnants of an abandoned city incinerator - more than 50,000 charred red bricks. He died in 1963, remembered as "a newspaperman, artist, furniture maker, machinist and builder." But that's not all: the deep broad arches housed a workshop where Moffitt, among other things, built a racetrack for rats.